I was curious about the Kudos button you mention in your
http://dcurt.is/web-standards article. I hovered over it with my mouse
pointer, and then it said “don’t move”. I didn’t move. Then it said
“sent”. Apparently someone invented a button that does not need to be
pressed in order to be triggered.

As much as I would like the CSS Working Group to collapse under the
weight of its own miserable failure, I sincerely hope that buttons that
do not need to be pressed in order to be triggered follow the same path
as idiotic animated paperclips and I very humbly request that you kindly
decrement the Kudos statistic by one unit in order to compensate for the
one that I definitely did not intend to send until it was forcefully
withdrawn from me by a deceitful human interface.

Cheers,
(name removed)

I’ve received about twenty emails and many more tweets from people with the same complaint. Somehow, when that hover button is triggered, people feel like part of their soul is being sucked in through the monitor by a CSS animation. Many use the word “theft”. I think it’s kind of funny.

Here’s what it actually does: when you hover over the button, a CSS transform animation is activated which fills the circle. After 1 second (the length of the animation), it fires a request to the server which increments an otherwise meaningless number by exactly one.